Easy Money, Hard Fouls, Cheap Laughs, and True Love in the NBA

About the author

Jayson Williams, the All-Star center of the New Jersey Nets, is a ten-year veteran of the NBA and a graduate of St. John's University. He is a recipient of the NAACP Trailblazer Award for community service, and sponsors the Jayson Williams Foundation for Underprivileged Youth. A native of New York City, he lives in northern New Jersey.

Steve Friedman is a contributing editor at Esquire magazine and a former senior editor at GQ. He has written for Outside, ESPN The Magazine, Details, and many other national publications, and his work has been collected in The Best American Sports Writing. He lives in New York City.

From the Hardcover edition.

more

The first candid report from a land of fragile egos, available women, unexpected tenderness, intramural fistfights, colossal partying, bizarre humor, inconceivable riches, and desperate competition, Loose Balls does for roundball what Ball Four did for hardball. From revelations about the meanest, softest, and smelliest players in the league, to Williams’s early days as a “young man with a lot of money and not a lot of sense,” to his strong and powerful views on race, privilege, and giving back, Loose Balls is a basketball book unlike any other.

No inspirational pieties or chest-thumping boasting here—instead, Jayson Williams gives us the real insider tales of refs, groupies, coaches, entourages, and all the superstars, bench warmers, journeymen, clowns, and other performers in the rarefied circus that is professional basketball.